The President of the Fire Service Association says a lack of equipment, breathing apparatus and fire appliances remain a gnawing problem for his members.
In fact, Kennedy Guy tells the Tv6 Morning Edition, he's hoping his new line Minister will address the many woes plaguing the services over the past years.
00:00We're now seeing entire geographical areas, like the entire west of Trinidad, on some evenings without an appliance.
00:09For the entire northern division, where we have 11 fire stations, in some days we have two or three stations only Marlon with firefighting appliances.
00:18The association president says oftentimes fire officers are forced to use their private vehicles to respond to emergencies.
00:27He again stresses the myriad health and safety issues affecting the members.
00:32That includes the personal protective equipment, the self-contained breathing apparatus sets, structural firefighting gloves of fire officers, and the list goes on and on.
00:41But if the minister looks at addressing, if he is sitting down this morning and putting together a priority listing for the fire service,
00:49I would say chief amongst that is the health and safety concerns of fire officers and the regularization of the auxiliary fire service.
00:57According to Mr. Guy, questions still hover over the report into the blaze that caused the death of former minister Lisa Morris Julian and two of her children.
01:08He believes it proves that the fire service is under-equipped.
01:12Guy found it passing strange that the report has still been kept under wraps.
01:16We are left to consider what are the reasons that the minister, after committing to transparency into this investigation,
01:27and committed to releasing the report, would fail to do so after receiving it.
01:32Not only that, we then had Minister Gonzalez who came to office for a very short time,
01:37but on his day of appointment, he made it clear that he was going to release the Morris Julian report.
01:42Now, 24 hours later, he began to walk that statement back.
01:45Guy is calling on the new Minister of Homeland Security to release the report as soon as possible.
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